Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (16 page)

Paul was oblivious to the look Ildico was giving him
and a moment later he was continuing his rage. “I tell you Ildico, there’s one
hell of an easy way to get rid of someone in this country. And I can’t believe
that you’re so fucking stupid you would actually tell me I shouldn’t talk about
it. Why is that?” He spoke in a mocking but sinister bogeyman voice. “Do you
think the strigoi will get me?”

“No. The strigoi won’t get you.”

“But it might Ildico. I went to that grave when you
told me not to. I saw something there that was like a strigoi...”

“You can’t see the strigoi,” Ildico said over the top
of him.

“Someone chased me in the forest and I fell in a
stream. As far as I could tell it was a man but to a stupid believer it was a
strigoi...”

“Who was chasing you?” Ildico asked.

“...and then it made me sick and since then I’ve been
dreaming of vampires and having violent thoughts. Now if I believed this
bullshit I would be thinking that the strigoi has got me? But I know what has
really happened. I got sick because I fell in a stream; I got wet and cold. And
the violent thoughts I’m having is because I’m working on a violent book and I
keep getting threatened with violence just by living here.”

“But who is threaten with violence?”

Paul looked at her, incredulous. “Nealla, Nealla has
threatened me.”

Ildico sat silent.

“Me, I believe in the rational. Everything I believe
is observable, measurable and repeatable. You... you believe in strigoi and
vampires and devil forests and God and an afterlife and that makes you fucking
stupid.”

Ildico stood up and set her wine glass down by the
laptop. She looked ready to leave but hovered for a second.

Then it hit him. What the hell was he doing?

Oh Jesus Christ. I spend all day stressing that I’m
going to get a pretty girl to come here and then I behave like a psycho.

Ildico walked out of the room.

“Ildico... Ildico, I’m sorry. I’m...”

A moment later she stepped back in. “Where did you put
my coat?”

From the hallway she should have seen it hanging from
the back of the chair in the kitchen, but with the power still out it would be
pitch black there. Paul picked up the candle and carefully walked through. “I’m
really sorry Ildico. I don’t have any excuse. I don’t know what came over me.”

He wanted to hammer his head off the wall.

This was a nice girl, a pretty girl, a lovely girl.
What the hell? Why call her stupid? Are you insane?

He set the candle on the kitchen table and lifted her
coat from the back of the chair. Suddenly, he was hit by a wave of panic. If
she walks out now, she would never come back. If he didn’t salvage the
situation in the next sixty seconds, there wouldn’t be a second chance. His
breathing strained, his heart jumped in his chest.

Don’t let her go.

“I put some pins in your coat,” he said pointing out
the safety-pin repair work. “I thought it might last until you can sew it or...
or...”

Don’t lose this girl. Don’t let her leave.

The vertigo started to rise, dizziness, a spinning
room. He looked at Ildico seeing her face. Tears ran over her cheeks; he had
made her cry.

“Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I never want to make
you cry.”

Then it happened.

It came with the vertigo.

A sensation like he was falling backwards through
space. But he wasn’t falling. He was kissing her; pressing her against the wall
of the hallway in darkness. He felt a throb in his trousers as her tongue
swirled around his. Who was kissing who? Who had started it? Who initiated it?

Did it matter?

They were walking to the bedroom, him carrying the
candle with one hand and shielding the flame with the other. Ildico clung to
his elbow.

Without expectation, things were back on track.

She didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to go back
outside.

On the bed. He unbuttoned her blouse. His fingers
trembled. She was so thin and slender. Her breasts were flat and firm against
her chest but as he peeled off her bra he saw juicy, fat nipples like
push-buttons; gorgeous, begging to be sucked and teased with his tongue.

He was sitting on the bed with Ildico straddling him.
They kissed. It was passionate. She was topless and working at the buttons of
his own shirt. He felt somehow disempowered in the exchange. Weak. Lacking
strength.

Oh God, this girl is crazy for it.

The vertigo assaulted him as much as his lust.
Dizziness as Ildico peeled off her clothes and his. His hands swept over her
skin, fingertips brushing over her flanks and around her back. He could feel
her ribs, her spine. With what felt a considerable effort he pulled her forward
to get one of her nipples in his mouth and it was greeted by a wave of
light-headed ecstasy. It was like being drunk, everything was slurring.

He felt a sudden moment of clarity and saw the world
as it really was. Ildico had got off him to slip out of her skin tight jeans.
Her legs were sticks she was so thin. Paul reached behind him, he was sitting
on the pillow and struggled to get his hand underneath and take the condoms. He
placed them beside the candle.

Ildico came back to him and helped pull off his own
jeans. Her head lowered to kiss his chest and he felt her ponytail tickle
across his abdomen as her hands went under his shorts to hold his penis. Cold,
bony fingers wrapped around his cock as her tongue flicked over his own
nipples.

She pulled off his shorts and he struggled to take off
his socks. It felt slow and difficult, like he was drugged. The world seemed to
spin as he endeavoured, vertigo feelings whooshed around his head. He was
sitting with his back to the headboard, wanting a breather, wanting a moment to
let the wooziness pass but Ildico climbed back on top to straddle him. She
still wore underwear, a black cotton thong. As she leant forward the tang drew
a clean black line through the crack of her ass and he felt his cock stiffen
into steel.

Paul lifted her upright and took hold of her pants to
pull them down.

“No!” she said boldly. “No, not now.”

The moment she said ‘no’ sent a surge of rage into his
system. He wanted to touch her pussy. He wanted to hold her down and grip her
wrists above her head with one hand whilst he fingered her with the other. He
wanted to make her slowly writhe by teasing her clit, he wanted to feel her
squirming with his fingers inside of her.

No...

She had said ‘no’?

Bitch.

It was a short lived feeling. Ildico pushed his legs
apart and knelt between them with her knees apart. Her head went down and her
ass went high in the air as she took him in her mouth.

The vertigo hit like a tsunami that sent his body
weakly juddering in submission. His head rocked back as he felt her tongue
drawing circles. The sensation stopped and he heard her voice speaking. It was
an effort but he brought his head back up to see, feeling as if all the
strength of his body drained.

“What?” he whispered.

“Watch me do it,” she said, repeating the
indecipherable words of a moment ago. As she whispered the words he could feel
her breath against his cock. In the candlelight she looked gorgeous. Naked, holding
his sex in her hands with moist lips poised just over the tip. “Watch me do
it,” she said again. Then her lips were wrapping around him, her hand was
stroking the shaft, her tongue was writing out the alphabet and her wide open
puppy-dog eyes were staring up lovingly.

The vertigo was overpowering. It wasn’t a sensation
like dizziness, more like one of falling. Falling forever, away from the scene
into an eternal blackness. He was falling into the deepest of nights.

The light from the candle exploded in intensity.

The sun was shining.

Forest
.

Lush forest, not the winter stripped trees but rich
with green leaves and a summer sun making everything warm, glowing all across
his body. Ildico stood before him with a hand on her hip as his body flushed
with exquisite sexual pleasure like he’d never felt before. They were fully
clothed in this fantasy; a fantasy that played out in real time against what
was happening naked in the bedroom.

Ildico was smiling as she peeled off a pullover and
dropped it aside. She slipped out of her jeans to stand in her underwear. She
was toying with him, teasing with smiles. She touched a finger to her teeth and
bit the end gently as a show. Then she turned and ran, squealing a laugh, a
girly little giggle. Paul tried to follow but felt slow and sluggish. His body
wasn’t responding the way it ought to.

“Ildico,” he called out with a smile. “I’m coming for
you Ildico.”

Even though fully dressed, he felt naked somehow.
Tickled, enticed, as though his entire body were being kissed and licked and
soothed. From behind a bush he heard Ildico giggle but by the time he’d got
there she was gone. She’d been there. Her bra was hooked to a branch.

Paul scanned the forest for clues, listening, but it
was hard to pick anything out. He felt overwhelmed with joy, with emotion, as
though parties with friends and the joys of life were exploding around him like
fireworks.

On the ground he spotted Ildico’s thong. She must be
fully nude now, somewhere in this forest, running naked in the glorious sunshine.
She was hiding, waiting for him to find her. He would find her... he would find
her and teach her a beautiful lesson for running. What a lesson it would be to
hold her down and spread her legs and slip inside her and...

There was a muffled scream. Paul froze and at the same
moment felt a powerful surging in his groin. The sexual ecstasy was still
enveloping his physical body but something about this was wrong. Perhaps wrong
wasn’t the word, it was bizarre, it was surreal, but that only added to the excitement.

He picked up her thong and turned it inside out to
lick the gusset. He wanted to taste her sex and bring back the fantasy, but all
that came was mild vertigo and a sensation that he should be fighting this. He
should resist. He should turn and run.

“Ildico?” he called.

There was nothing for a moment.

Then from behind, came that awful exhaled breath. He
knew what it was behind him... he couldn’t bring himself to say it...

He wanted to turn, needed to, but his body wasn’t
prepared to respond. He could feel something rising inside him, an explosion of
power that was overwhelming, a growing power that when unleashed would tear him
apart. It was making his body lock, his muscles go rigid, his breathing stop.

I must break this... I must break this... Oh God.

“ILDICO!”

He screamed her name as he spun around and saw it.

The vampire.

Its skin was marble, pure white. It was naked, its
muscles powerful. It held Ildico against a tree, gripping her vagina with one
hand and holding her head with the other. Her legs were splayed, lifeless, as
the vampire kissed her. Except it wasn’t kissing her. It was...

“Oh, God, no... Ildico...”

The vampire turned to him. Its body was splashed in
blood from the gaping hole in Ildico’s throat. It was eating her, ripping her
apart with its teeth. She was already dead. It held her thin naked body upright
with its powerful fingers hooked around her crotch. Blood covered her tits, her
torso.

The vampire didn’t show emotion, but if it could, then
in those red glassy eyes it was smiling. It was the horror. The horror. And at
the same moment that Paul watched this thing drinking from the poor naive
Romanian girl he was feeling the most exquisite sexual feeling of his life.
Somewhere else, in a bedroom lit by a single candle, Ildico was tasting his
cum. In the real world semen was pumping from his balls into her mouth, but
here in his head he was watching her murdered and feeling it as the most
gratifying sexual experience of his life. In the forest he felt the warmth
happening inside his clothing. He was cumming in his own pants just from seeing
the vampire kill the naked girl. It was gorgeous. It was exquisite. An orgasm
more powerful and gratifying than any he had ever felt before simply from
looking at her bloody corpse.

Although he would never be aware of it consciously,
for the rest of his life, he would forever be in pursuit of this feeling. No
matter what it would cost. He had to. He had to have it. He would have to
experience this feeling again. No matter what the cost, he would have to feel
this again...

...and again.

...and again.

PART III

The
cockerel was crowing and Paul was staring at the ceiling. He’d been like that
for five or six minutes when it suddenly dawned on him that he was alone.
Ildico. Perhaps she was in the kitchen making coffee. What a treat that would
be.

Paul slipped out of the covers and pulled on some
shorts. “Ildico,” he called moving out of the bedroom. “Ildico?” He looked in
the kitchen to find it sadly empty with an unwelcome coldness to the air. She
wasn’t in the bathroom either, or the living room or the empty room leading to
the balcony.

Her coat was gone.

“What? You leave without saying goodbye?”

It felt rude that she’d just slipped away after last
night, but still, there was probably a good reason. He hardly knew anything of
her private life. She said that she worked occasionally as a cleaner and
perhaps that was where she’d gone. Yes, that sounded plausible.

How nice it would have been to find her here. How nice
it would be to kiss her and hug her and say ‘good morning’ to this pretty girl
in his home. How nice it would be to eat breakfast with her. Another morning
they would do this.

It was her work that had stolen her away so early. Her
cleaning job. It made sense, she had a job that started early and she didn’t
want to wake him. That was what was nice about her. That was what made her
wonderful.

----- X -----

The
photograph of the cross at the centre of the shrine was on the laptop screen.
He’d stopped the slideshow to stare at this single image hoping it would jump
start his imagination at a precise point. The story panels stared down from the
walls. Jesus stared down from the other wall.

“Let’s put this into play,” he whispered. “Show me.”

Nothing happened.

The story panels didn’t fade to his personalised
cinema screen, they sat there staring back as helpful as the brick wall they
were hung from. Paul looked to the painting of Jesus. “And why are you looking
so smug?” Jesus remained serene.

He concentrated on the image of the cross, trying to
blot out the rest of the world and fill his vision with the single image,
waiting for it to trigger his creative process.

Nothing happened.

He set the photographs to slowly loop through a
slideshow, hoping something would set him off.

It didn’t.

He made coffee and returned to watch the pictures. He
collected the small silver cross with the twine and wrapped it around his
wrist. “You know you were around the wrist of a vampire,” he said to the cross.
“I pulled you off a dead body. I’m now an accidental grave robber.”

Nothing.

“Come on man, concentrate. Vampires in the basement.”

Nothing.

The photographs faded in and out.

He’d put all of the images he had into the slideshow.
Ildico turned up in a few and she made him smile. She was stood on the balcony
of Castle Bran. There was a picture of her in the gardens and one by the giant
saw. The saw. It was a giant torture device. “Let’s strap somebody to that
table.”

Nisha. The voice, his own voice almost shouted her
name in his head.

“You think you can fuck me then hold an accusation of
rape over me? I will strap you to that table and smile at your begs and screams
for mercy as that blade rides between your legs. I’ll laugh when it tears
through your guts ending your life, you fucking whore bitch!”

Nothing.

He couldn’t even see the pictures of Nisha’s
evisceration in his mind. They were just words he was speaking out loud. Words
about killing. Should it be so easy to speak about killing Nisha? Should it
feel so good to say it aloud?

Get it off your chest. It’s just play acting.

“I wanted to love you, Nisha. But now I would love to
kill you. You fucking hurt me and terrified me and held false accusations over
me like a blade to my throat. You inflicted hurt and pain and rejection and
stress and I fucking hate you and I want you dead.”

Nothing.

Pointless.

Fuck Nisha. She wasn’t the avenue to regain
imagination. Forget her. She’s not important. What was important was his
creativity, always so fertile, always so rich and active, had today gone
utterly mute.

The photographs rolled back around to the cross in the
shrine. He would go back there. He would go back to jumpstart his story mind.

----- X -----

The
sky looked like it had a dirty, moth-eaten sheet hanging from it. A blanket of
smooth grey clouds pierced by occasional holes of sunlight.

There were a few people sporadically in the street and
courtyard. He passed close to a wrinkled woman in a mauve woollen headscarf who
was beating a carpet by the communal bins; she had the rug hung over a steel
frame that looked like a goalpost, purpose built for beating rugs and shaking
off the dust. Vacuum cleaners, it seemed, were still to be introduced to Noua.
Despite her advanced years she was whipping the hell out of the rug.

Whipping. He tried to picture Ildico hanging by her
wrists from that frame in place of the rug. He tried to see her jeans pulled
down to expose her ass and envision a birch in his hand to whip her naked
buttocks. He tried, but it was like he was telling himself rather than seeing
it for real.

Strange he should want to see Ildico in such painful
torture; she was wonderful and it wasn’t right to have that fantasy. Right now
he would be happy with any fantasy coming to life just to know his imagination
was back at his command. Hopefully the shrine would bring it back. He hoped it
would. In fact he felt entirely certain it would. It was a foregone conclusion.
He just had to visit the shrine and everything would be back to normal. All he
had to do was get to the shrine.

On the way, he saw something he would rather not see.

Big Man and Boy.

They were almost out of view, down a little track
between smallholdings on the way to the forest; too distant and facing the
wrong way to pay him any mind. Big Man had his arm around the kid and was
hugging his shoulders as they walked. Although they were distant, he could see
that Boy had his head drooped and tipped away, his feet dragged and his whole
body seemed to move through an odd shuffling.

For at least a minute he watched as they receded to
the distance. Before vanishing entirely from view, Big Man turned Boy to face
him and lifted the kid’s chin with one of his meat hook hands. Even at such a
distance Paul could tell that the boy was crying. Big Man squat down like a
parent about to button up the coat of their child. Then he kissed Boy on the
lips, a kiss of reassurance, but...

But...

What the hell?

No grown man would kiss a boy like that, unless they
were family, perhaps? Maybe they were brothers? It would be easy to think that
if in a forgiving mood.

“There’s something very wrong in that story,” Paul
said aloud. “Something very, very wrong.”

----- X -----

Reaching
the shrine was easy now he knew the route. His enthusiasm was building and he
found himself striding, he practically ran down and back up the big V shaped
gully, he grinned on seeing the long fallen tree alongside the path. Such
strange feelings and emotions for this place.

Thoughts, feelings, images.

Arousal of the senses.

He detoured from the route to find the gully he’d
traversed the day he’d fallen into the stream, the one that had made him
feverish. He stood at the base to look along its length. The water was hidden
beneath a layer of ice and snow but he could still hear it. He listened
closely, staring along the trench, mesmerized, almost hypnotised by the sound
of water.

His imagination felt close by.

He was back in time, running away from the person in
the camouflaged clothing. He looked along the length of the gully and
remembered the emotion, relived it, sensing the stress and panic as he’d fled.
His heart quickened and he physically felt his veins and arteries widening to
allow blood to flow easier. He felt his iris tighten to sharpen his vision. He
felt as his eardrums attuned to absorb the acoustics of the forest in highest
fidelity.

Then it happened.

He saw the vampire.

At the very far end of the gully was the naked white
figure, skin like marble, eyes of coloured red glass. It was walking towards
him. The snow and ice didn’t matter, the cold didn’t matter. This powerful
naked man was impervious to cold. He walked in slow but deliberate steps
staring straight at Paul. Tree branches arched overhead from either side of the
gully to form a tunnel through the forest. Snow began falling in large cotton
candy flakes; falling in slow motion, obscuring the creature slightly.

“You are the one who chased me that day, aren’t you. I
wasn’t chased by a hunter or a crazy person. It was you.”

Paul watched it get closer admiring its features. The
muscle tone was sublime, but it was the eyes, those lifeless yet beautiful eyes
that made it special.

Then it was gone.

When Paul reached the shrine he was breathing hard but
enjoying the exertion. Long streams of breath poured from his mouth and he
rested with hands on hips at the entrance to the grave. He spent a few moments
admiring the cruciform of Christ. He reached up to touch it, to feel how cold
the metal figure of Jesus was to his fingertips. Briefly in his imagination he
saw the cruciform being placed, as though he was looking through the eyes of
whomever had originally hung it; he was looking at his outstretched arm with
his fingers hooked around the crucifix and his thumb resting on the figurine of
Jesus. He felt it in his hand. It was real. He had hold of it. In his mind he
mentally took a photograph of his outstretched arm holding the cruciform.

The damaged cross inside the shrine was still damaged.
The mysterious person or persons who maintained the site had not been here
since. It was still broken and still in exactly the position he’d left it.
There was no negative emotion at the thought of breaking it. No guilt for
spoiling the site. The damage didn’t really matter. It would probably have
fallen of its own accord given a little more time.

As he left the shrine he spotted a tree which took on
an odd fascination and he stared at it, fixated, eyes glued. He suspected it
was the tree from his imagination where he had seen the vampire feeding from
Ildico. It was a very powerful reminiscence, like déjà vu or a mysterious sense
that told him this was the place, that here was where it had happened. In a
forest of a million trees he would have expected one tree to look like the next
yet this one held a magnetic fascination.

Ildico.

With her name uttered in his subconscious came a surge
of sexual excitement. A dreamy fantasy. He was looking at a tree but It felt
like watching porn. Ildico. She had become so frustratingly desirable. He
pictured the fantasy precisely, his imagination returning. He had hold of her
against that tree. She was naked, she was weakened to the point she could
barely stand without leaning against the trunk for support. Her skin was as
cold to touch as the snow her bare feet stood upon, but the blood coming from
her throat was warm, viscous and flowing. In his trousers his penis was hard
within seconds of forming the picture in his head, his testicles felt like they
were ready to unload. In his mind’s eye he was holding her neck and chin and
tilted her head so that he could gaze into her eyes as she died. He saw her
eyes up close, her beautiful hazel brown irises, the darkest black pupils. He
saw this and felt the blood running over his hand and between her tits and it
was almost enough to make him orgasm. The only reason he didn’t was he turned
away from the tree and forcibly broke off the imagination. He instantly
regretted it.

Why shouldn’t he enjoy a sexual fantasy of Ildico?
That fantasy was so powerful his lucid dreaming of her slit throat would have
been enough to make him cum. It’s not wrong to enjoy those fantasies, in fact
it was stupid of him to turn away. He should have stayed looking at her, and
fucked her and killed her and cum in his pants from thinking about it and loved
every fucking second.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

There’s nothing at all wrong with that!

----- X -----

Paul
crossed the courtyard towards the block in a contented frame of mind. The loss
and subsequent return of his imagination was of no greater worry than losing
and finding a bunch of keys but the affair had felt odd. He couldn’t ever
remember a time when his creative ability had failed him. He’d had it from
childhood and it was as natural as breathing. Strange it had suddenly stopped.

Nothing to worry about.

The walk back had been filled with thoughts of Ildico
and occasional ruminations on Nisha. Why she should be intrusively invading his
thoughts was a real mystery. It should be in the past, done and dusted, all
forgotten about. It was months ago, half a world from here, yet she had
becoming a slowly creeping obsession?